Ninjamestari

C'mon people, there's no need to be **** about this. I think the OP has gotten the point.

*sigh* When hitting things, you're trying to exercise as little strength as humanly possible as to not over-extend yourself. That's why very sharp things eventually became much more widespread than clubby things (and eventually, strength was taken out of the equation more or less completely). You not only keep dodging the point, but also replied to 1/3 of the argument I was making in the post you quoted and like 1/10th of the argument I was making in the first place. You're a weasel, you know that. My argument has been the same from the beginning, you're the one that tries new angles with every single post. Now you're trying to twist a simple "a stronger blow will cause more damage" into some "actually in combat you're trying to do this and that fancy stuff I've never really understood anything about but heard someone talking of which was cool!" So let's clarify, you are of the opinion that more strength behind a hit doesn't equate to more damage caused? I mean are you seriously deluded enough to start arguing against physics? And just in case this wasn't clear, I'm not talking just about swords here, but even with a cutting weapon such as a sword, more power means more momentum and kinetic energy being applied to the actual cutting.

It's not a problem. To me it functions like Chi in the martial arts, where it's a representation of life force. You buff up your body, and your muscles become a magical capacitor able to project more soul-based power. With that sort of mental gymnastics you'll be able to adapt to anything, so why defend the system when you've got nothing to gain and nothing to lose?

Sounds like you've never hit anything. It's obvious to anyone who has ever hit something that the more you put strength behind the strike, the more damage you can cause. To me it sounds like you're still just rationalizing 'the way you see strength' in order to keep up your argument.

CON used to be a dump stat, but now that they've raised the effect of constitution to 5% per point instead of 3%, you can no longer safely dump it, which is good. 15% less HP didn't affect your survivability enough to be worth 5 points that could be put elsewhere. Hell, 5 points in RES seemed to be mostly a better investment, and thus CON became the favorite dump stat for damage roles. 3 points is not enough to justify a 15% drop in HP on the other hand unless you're really point starved however, and the 35% reduction in HP for going full nutcase on dumping constitution is SEVERE, unlike the 21% that just only began to be noticeable. Also 5% is enough to warrant investing in CON instead of RES for that extra survivability, and it is RES that is now the dump stat for ranged dps. Also, I do have to point out the same thing Durgarnkuld did, which is that keeping a weak glass-cannon is quite easy to keep out of harms way, not to mention that you can just slap heavy armor on the guy which will help out a lot more than the added constitution, especially when everyone can get limited constant recovery, and dps casters that tend to have high int AND might get a really good regeneration out of it. That ability is amazing, and it makes it much more appealing to invest to INT and MIG for tanking characters as well. DEX is the safest dump stat on tanks, and PER can safely be neglected a little bit. But in general you're right, and it definitely wouldn't be as appealing to dump RES either if keeping a caster away from harms way wasn't so ridiculously easy and if there weren't so many ways of compensating. Unlike damage, where more is always good, you only need as much HP that as you need to survive the encounter, as hitpoints are replenished afterwards, and losing out on health is easy to circumvent by simply resting more often.

Perhaps, but to me the OPs gripe feels genuine.

The point is that in combat there are save or suck situations. If there's a punch coming your way, you'll either avoid it or you'll be eating dirt; there's nothing wrong with a little save or suck, and that is the only way to have hard control in the game. Hard control on the other hand adds depth, you need to be able to deal with one or two characters being stunned, you can't just rely on your generic super-stats. I've heard the "being stunned is not fun" argument many times, but being on the receiving end isn't supposed to be 'fun', games are supposed to challenge you, forcing you to adapt to the possibility of losing control of your party members in various ways is part of the fun. EDIT: in other words, I doubt most people would agree that this is a problem, if it is not taken too far, and I don't recall any encounter in PoE besides those damn Fampyr that really abused such abilities, and even when it comes to them there are ways take preventive measures. EDIT EDIT: without extensive hard control the game easily devolves into the binary "my HP times DPS is bigger than yours, I win" - situations that we see in most MMOs and plenty other games, which is kinda boring to me. To each their own, but I'm glad that there's plenty of hard CC, I like my games to be punishing, and even unfair, to a point.

Arguments, not slurs and appeals to my ego. *Honest* arguments. You understand perfectly well the differences in the shades of grey on the subject. Trying to muddy the waters and confuse the point that is quite clear is not arguing, it's deception. And I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt, assuming you were smart enough to understand the very basic concept and why Strength, even though it is an abstraction, has a stronger connect with reality than "might" that doesn't even behave like you'd expect to. Might as well refers to physical prowess, not mental, and that is just another flaw in the idea. Are you saying that I cannot safely make that assumption with you?

Really? There's an instinctual understanding that when I'm 5 strong, I get -5 to hit and -4 to damage, but when I'm 18/76-90 strong I get +2 to hit and +4 to damage? Do you really believe that people feel more connected to their characters when their character has a "strength" attribute that can be an arbitrary number? At least system in Pillars was consistent - Might made things more powerful. All of them, universally. If you ask me, that's exactly the kind of streamlining attributes need, because as it stands, it's always "This attribute does this, this, this and this, except when that happens, that's when it starts doing this." You have to stretch it for it to make roleplaying sense, but you have to do that with pretty much all abstractions in RPGs. Don't act like an idiot, you're smarter than that and you know exactly what I meant. People have an instinctual understanding what strength is an what it means to have more or less of it.

Can't believe I missed this one. It's not only fair to point that out, it is also extremely important, as that leads directly to the consequences of this particular design choice. Strength as an attribute is very concrete and people have a strong instinctual understanding of what it is. This helps in creating stronger immerison, as everyone already has an instinctive understanding of what the stat does and thus it helps establish the connection between player and player character. Replacing such a stat with an abstract concept of might only serves to create confusion, and it is incredibly detrimental to player immersion.

Now that I think of it, there's got to be implications on having so many god-likes in a single area. This could've easily been used to create quests and events related to the issues caused. If birds of a feather flock together, then it would only be natural for those god-likes to start forming groups and factions, especially if most of them didn't end up getting any land. It's not that difficult to take an odd detail and turn it into a well fleshed out feature. It is work intensive though, which is why we see these "could've been easily fixed" - cases so often.

All language that is used to discuss loaded issues becomes loaded. Trying to circumvent the language distracts from the actual subject and serves only to muddy the waters. I don't find it useful to try to placate people who can't discuss reality without being triggered, their emotions and feelings are their responsibility, as are their behaviors and reactions. Trying to take that responsibility away from them doesn't serve anyone, where as letting their tantrums come out publicly serves as a lesson to everyone on what happens when you don't exercise emotional self control. The one thing that separates a mature mind from that of a child is the ability to not be triggered by reality. As far as the role of women argument goes, there are certain people who can't seem to grasp the difference between general and universal. I don't think restricting the stats of player rolled female characters serves any purpose, especially in a single player game, where everyone can adjust their stats according to the fantasy they have in mind. Understanding the biological and economical role women play in a society on the other hand is incredibly important when designing plausible worlds and stories. People in general waste way too much time on fantasizing how things *should be*, time they could use to figure out how things *are*. The important thing here is to realize that you cannot hope to understand the former question before you've tackled with the latter. When you understand how things *are*, the how they *should be* kinda starts forming on its own. This is a universal truth that applies to everything, including game design. You need to *know* your target audience before you can determine the kind of product they want, and part of that is realizing that your audience rarely knows itself. A democratic approach to game design leads to an abundance of surface thoughts, but it tends to prevent any deeper ideas from surfacing, and a lot of the problems PoE suffers from are a product of this. Having a singular vision is paramount to achieving excellence, otherwise people will all wander around in their own direction instead of truly working together. This happens everywhere in any industry where design choices matter, and can be observed in the steady decline in the overall quality of user interfaces in the last couple of decades. The more people use fancy methodologies to test usability in larger groups instead of trusting a singular vision, the less user friendly the products have become. The UI of skype is a prime example, Youtube is another. EDIT: oh, and just to prevent this post from being exclusively a rant, I agree on your assessments on quests 100%.

That would depend on whether or not there's a cap on crit chance. If not, then you want to go all the way into PER to get more reliable crits.

Immersion is essentially an act of seduction, it just might help a player care. This could be interesting, it would probably make the god-like feel more like a real part of the fantasy instead of just an arbitrary option that doesn't really fit.

Making cognitive leaps like that is something that happens when a player is already sufficiently invested, players who are not already highly invested and immersed in the fantasy will not be able, nor willing, to make that kind of cognitive leaps on their own. Whether or not an explanation is 'required' is a question for the developers, but I would consider it a good practice to gently guide the player towards these cognitive paths that will ease them into the game-world despite the god-like mess all over the place or other similar situations.

The relative power of a character is not a matter of opinion, it is a measurable quantity that can be calculated. The game logic and character power is based on math. I'm really not interested in having an argument about sentiment, those are never useful for anyone. Correct, but that situation is highly specific and hypothetical. That 70% crit will allow a secondary damage source of 30% to kill that opponent, while the former case will need another full blast. Also, 18 perception will get crits much more likely than the 12 perception making him/her a more reliable damage dealer. All in all, trying to account for all possible scenarios in these sorts of discussions is neither possible nor useful, which is why we're dealing with generalizations. Obviously if you run into a situation where your first spell deals anywhere between 50% and 99% depending on your build and excluding random elements such as criticals, it really doesn't matter how your stats are distributed; you're still going to need two spells to finish off the enemy, but those situations are extremely rare when accounting for the random hit rolls, the damage of other party members and potential heals the enemy might get. When it comes to INT vs MIG for an artilery Wizard, that will depend on how many extra enemies you will manage to fit in the larger radius, but in a hypothetical generalized situation where the number of enemies is high but undetermined and they are spread relatively evenly along the surface area being targeted, you're correct. The MIG vs INT in the artilery case does have a certain gray area. Overall though, an optimal artillery wiz would have max MIG max PER *and* max INT; having a decent value in one of the three most important stats isn't enough to make a character very good in this particular role, so when it comes to Aloth (if anyone is interested in his case anymore), his spec is still far from optimal. All in all, Wizards will usually want to dump RES completely and CON and DEX slightly to be able to get most out of all of their spells, both control and damage. In essence this still means min-maxing the stats, but instead of following class flavor when doing so, you're simply defining a mechanical role with the stats.

Sounds like you should've been on the dev team ^^

Actually my dumbass wizard probably never studied a single book; he's a steroid-pumped gym-monster through and though, and is probably too stupid to even tell different letters apart, let alone read or write. I really don't see a problem with this. *shrug* Also, I seriously doubt that assertion that if Aloth is the main DPS character, the rest must suck, would hold up to actual scrutiny. This was the original argument, you merely extended that to tanking by stating that you can make a non min-max tank that is viable, Pallegina for example. I tried to explain to you that this wasn't the case being discussed, as we were making comparisons, not assessing viability. I obviously forgot who had said what, and you obviously were not the problem child here. That honor goes to this guy: So you want proof that a wizard with 12 perception and 12 might deals less damage than a wizard with 18 in both? You need proof that a character that can engage two enemies and has lower deflection (Pallegina) cannot tank as effectively as a charcter that can engage 4 enemies and has higher deflection (Eder)? Or that either of those could even hold a candle to a properly min-maxed fighter tank build? I mean seriously? high probability does not equal concrete truth only that it may be more likely true than not. It remains as such unitl observable evidence is presented to take it out of the realm of probability.

You, or someone, did argue against the fact that Aloth being the main dps in a party doesn't make him a good dps. Don't try to pretend this didn't happen, we can go back to quote those old posts if you want, they're still here. Shame on you, at least have the integrity to stand by your words or admit your mistake.

Perhaps you should go back to school so you can learn to use terms like "high probability" in a proper context. A wizard with 18 might and 18 perception does better damage than wizard with 12/12, that is an undeniable fact, and you're trying to deny that. I really don't appreciate your dishonest arguments.

That rationalization could work if it was presented by the game and not a player on the forums. Makes it kinda sad, considering that all it would've taken to preserve the integrity of immersion was an NPC commenting on the number of Godlikes the offer for land had attracted, and a little speculation on how "I guess the whole legacy business doesn't concern them, seeing how they're not able to get kids in the first place".

I suspected that your intentions were not honest. I'm glad you're willing to admit that. I've found that people defending the system rarely do, due to the fact that their arguments are based on sentiment and not reality. When faced with arguments they can't deal with honestly, they tend to act like you did.

So you want proof that a wizard with 12 perception and 12 might deals less damage than a wizard with 18 in both? You need proof that a character that can engage two enemies and has lower deflection (Pallegina) cannot tank as effectively as a charcter that can engage 4 enemies and has higher deflection (Eder)? Or that either of those could even hold a candle to a properly min-maxed fighter tank build? I mean seriously?

I wouldn't mind the cipher getting a complete overhaul anyway. What you're proposing is something I'd definitely like to see in the game, although I might go around creating a bit more elaborate system for it instead of just having a few distinct combat maneuvers. Perhaps in melee you want to build up momentum for your attacks, juggling between maneuvers that utilize or sacrifice the momentum you've been able to build and maneuvers that build or maintain the momentum of your swings. This would help create the base-line for the melee variants of any class, and giving more options for building around concepts such as the arcane warrior.

That proves that *one* of my statements was wrong, namely the "they failed at everything they set out to do" - one. It however doesn't even approach dealing with the rest of what I've said. Besides, if making a system that has so little impact that you can distribute your stats randomly and still win the game on the hardest difficulty, then the situation is even more alarming than I initially proposed. Especially considering that Min-Max builds are still the most powerful ones. Every single character concept can find one or two dump stats that will make them more powerful, and if your answer to that is to use the stat system as a tool of make-believe rather than a system to be gamed for a variety of powerful approaches then go ahead, but I want my choices in character creation to have an impact and to have them resonate a plausible fantasy so that I can immerse in my character, not just be meaningless numbers that only facilitate the ability to play pretend. That being said, Aloth is still a bad damage dealer, and if the rest of your party is even worse then they definitely aren't very good, and hell yeah you need to go to specifics about this, otherwise you're just blowing **** out of your ass.